Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer and precious metals like gold, highlighting rather than hiding cracks. It reflects wabi-sabi: valuing imperfection, resilience, and the beauty of repair.

As a metaphor, kintsugi has long grounded Onyx’s work with people navigating chronic illness, disability, mental illness, trauma, and oppression. As a mixed-race Japanese American, these concepts are foundational to how Onyx practices. Asher’s lived experience at the intersection of trauma, chronic illness, and queerness also resonates with “tending to the cracks,” and they pair this with an ongoing interrogation of how their white privilege and internalized white supremacy shape clinical and business choices.

At Kintsugi Therapist Collective, this philosophy guides our work. We see trauma, illness, disability, oppression, grief, and mental health challenges as meaningful parts of a person’s story, not flaws to erase, and we are committed to disability justice, trauma-informed care, LGBTQIA+ affirming therapy, and sustainable healing.

What is unique about Kintsugi Therapist Collective?

Kintsugi Therapist Collective is a community for therapists, healers, and care workers who believe that lived experience, vulnerability, and ongoing healing can deepen—rather than diminish—ethical, attuned, and effective care.

Unlike many organizations that prioritize productivity and expertise, KTC centers sustainability, embodiment, vulnerability, disability justice, trauma-informed practice, and liberatory approaches to mental health. We recognize practitioners as humans with their own histories, and see this self-awareness as essential to meaningful clinical work.

Members of KTC have access to:

- Clinical consultation, mentorship, and practice development rooted in sustainability and embodiment

- Reality-based support for building and maintaining private practice without sacrificing wellbeing

- A collaborative, justice-oriented community of therapists, coaches, healers, and care workers

- Opportunities to reduce isolation and build lasting professional relationships

- A practitioner directory connecting clients with trauma-informed, LGBTQIA+ affirming, disability-conscious, liberatory providers

- Opportunities to lead groups, teach, write, publish, and help transform mental health culture

KTC exists to challenge the idea that care providers must be endlessly productive, fully healed, or detached from their own vulnerability. We believe sustainable practice, authentic connection, and collective healing create stronger practitioners and healthier communities.

We do not see burnout as a personal failure or something “fixed” by better self‑care. It’s a predictable response to systems that demand constant availability and productivity while minimizing care workers’ needs and limits.

Drawing from disability justice, embodied practice, relational psychotherapy, and decolonizing approaches, we critique professionalism that values expertise over humanity, independence over interdependence, and productivity over sustainability. Therapists are often expected to be the “well provider” despite their own grief, trauma, illness, disability, and oppression.

KTC challenges the idea that therapists must appear untouched by suffering. Pressure to hide pain, fatigue, disability, or vulnerability disconnects care workers from their bodies and capacities—and burnout often follows.

From a disability justice lens, burnout is meaningful information: a sign of mismatch between a person’s capacity and the demands placed on them. Rather than urging therapists to push through or adapt to harmful conditions, we support deeper relationship with their bodies, needs, limits, desires, and sources of nourishment.

We also look at how ableism, capitalism, white supremacy, colonialism, and cisheteronormativity fuel burnout by equating worth with output and treating rest and dependence as weaknesses.

Our work invites therapists to imagine professional lives rooted in embodiment, mutuality, access intimacy, community, and sustainability. Instead of striving to be perpetually “fine,” we support practitioners in being more honest about their humanity and more skillful in responding to it.

We believe therapists do not heal by transcending their struggles, but by staying in relationship with themselves, their communities, and their bodies—even when things are hard. Sustainable practice is not about eliminating vulnerability; it’s about creating conditions where vulnerability is held with dignity, support, and care.

Read more: “We Need Not Be Fine: A manifesto for mental healthcare workers who can’t go on like this.”

Membership begins with enrollment in a yearlong Embodied Practice Cohort. All alums maintain evergreen access to the KTC virtual space.

You can listen to several of our members describe and discuss their experiences of being participants in the yearlong Embodied Practice Cohort in this podcast.

You can read testimonials about Embodied Practice Cohort and Mending With Gold — just scroll to the bottom of each page.

You can also refer to our Instagram and Facebook for additional content.